A Stellar Concept Video for iOS 11 and the Rebirth of the Mac

Page 2 – News Debris For The Week Of May 15th

The Rebirth of the Mac is Coming

Apple has taken some heat lately for its Mac lineup. The new iMacs, possibly with Xeon CPUs, are expected until the fall. The new Mac Pro isn’t expected until some time in 2018. This would seem to make it imperative that Apple introduce (if not ship) new notebooks at WWDC next month. Jonny Evans at Computerworld has the scoop. “WWDC: Apple’s Kaby Lake MacBook upgrades coming soon.”

Even if you never purchase Apple’s next Mac Pro, Jason Snell explains why it “holds an important place in the lineup.” See: “Championing the Mac Pro.”

The truth is, every professional user is the most vertical of niches: a target market of one, with specific needs and desires that need to be fulfilled. Very few of us are lucky enough to have the perfect product emerge from Apple’s factories, so we have to pick and choose and find the closest approximation that we can afford.

That’s the advantage of making professional products not just powerful, but flexible in terms of specs and features. The more flexible the product line, the more fuzzy space there is for professional users to fit inside.

And so. Might we expect a slightly different, more flexible port configuration for the Kaby Lake MacBook Pros? That would be an amazing, welcome concession to customers. Perhaps the Mac community, having had so long to formulate its thoughts about Apple, Macs, the competition and their own needs will have an impact on future designs.

In any case, my instincts suggest that it won’t be too long before Apple’s Mac lineup starts to look much better. WWDC will be the litmus test.

One More Debris

Email on the Mac is beleaguered. There have been several misfires in the history of trying to one-up Apple’s Mail app, but none have gone the distance. Whenever I see an article that discusses alternatives to the Mail app, one that’s always mentioned is the trusty Thunderbird.

Once upon a time, a unified code base for Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird sounded great… What’s happened now is a divorce-of-convenience… the Firefox and Thunderbird source code will diverge. It’s over between the two – not with a bang, but a whimper.

Email is one of those things that’s terribly important for some people, but not for many others. It’s not very sexy anymore. And so, we remain stuck with the Mail app, Thunderbird, Outlook and a few others. Things will probably never get any better for email.

And so we limp along with less than stellar solutions. It’s sad.

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Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the tmo headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holidays.

There is something much more important. Apple should release new Mac models every year, as done with iOS gadgets. Macs should have standard connectors allowing upgradable components, including SSD, RAM, CPU and GPU. And Apple should not charge two to three times more for the very same component when compared to resellers like Amazon.

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1 year ago

Member

LV_Doc

#8618

They’d better do something hardware-wise soon, and it had better be convincing.

If not, then it’s time for Mr. Cook to ask himself, “what would Steve do?”

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1 year ago

Member

JoelS

#8535

Great little video that just illustrates how bad the current Apple leadership is.